Currupt FCPX libraries in Blu-ray

I went nuts when I couldn’t recover my film projects. Thank goodness I still kept a copy in a hard drive.

Archiving is a sensitive thing. And if you work in film it can be an expensive thing. So a long ago I chose optical media. DVDs, originally. Blu-rays, currently. When I am pretty sure I have finished working on a project I burn the original files and library in a disc and delete it from my hard drive. Then I can get it back it if I ever have to to use the footage, or if a client wants me to do a second version of a finished project. I had never had any problems in the past, when I used video editors like Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas and Final Cut Pro 7.

But this week my alarms have gone off when I couldn’t recover a Final Cut Pro X library from a Blu-ray disc. The Finder showed an “error code -36”. The problem might be related to the fact that FCPX libraries are not single files. They are a bundle, and therefore a container or folder, under the aspect of a file with extension .fcpbundle and a nice icon. But inside such a file/folder there are hundreds or thousands of small files. I bet the Blu-ray filesystem I use to burn my libraries doesn’t like all those little files.

I haven’t checked the actual reason, and I haven’t found anyone in the web with the same problem. For now I’ll solve it compressing the fcpbundle in a zip. Has anyone out there faced the same problem?